Israel's battles, the prophets' longing, Jesus' command to love enemies, and the honest ways Christians have disagreed. Read through the One who told Peter to put his sword away.
What does the Bible say about war? It tells the truth about a great deal of it, Israel's included, and it never pretends war is good. The whole story bends toward peace: the prophets longed for swords beaten into plowshares, and Jesus, the clearest picture of God we have, blessed the peacemakers and told Peter to put his sword away.
No nation fights God's wars now. His Kingdom is already here, and it has never advanced by the sword.
The Bible does not hand you a one line rule on war. It hands you a story. Read it flat and you can prove almost anything. Read it through Jesus and the direction is clear.
The Old Testament is full of battles, and some of the commands are hard to read out loud.
“However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.”
Deuteronomy 20:16The strongest case for these texts: Deuteronomy 12:31 accuses those nations of burning their children as offerings, and careful scholars read the total language as ancient war rhetoric, since Deuteronomy 7:3 forbids marrying the peoples it says to wipe out, and Judges 1 finds them still in the land. The background is in the Canaanites in the Bible. Those points soften the picture. They do not dissolve it.
Treating the killing of whole populations as righteous, or saying it is not our place to ask. That turns God into someone Jesus would not recognize.
These chapters reflect how Israel understood holy war in its ancient world. People fought and judged in God's name in ways that did not reflect His heart, and Scripture records that honestly.
The Son is the exact representation of God's being (Hebrews 1:3). When James and John wanted fire called down on a Samaritan village, Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:54 to 55). We walked the same road in our Deuteronomy summary and with Saul and the Amalekites in obedience is better than sacrifice.
Even the Old Testament shows the unease. David, the warrior king, could not build the temple.
“But this word of the LORD came to me: ‘You have shed much blood and have fought many wars. You are not to build a house for my Name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight.’”
1 Chronicles 22:8Israel's wars are recorded honestly, not held up as a pattern for us.
The prophets saw where the story was headed. Isaiah 2 and Micah 4 carry almost the same oracle: the nations coming to learn God's ways.
“He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”
Isaiah 2:4Notice the order. The nations learn God's ways first, and then the weapons change. Peace here is what happens to people who have been taught by God. Psalm 46:9 says, “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth.”
The earliest Christians believed this had already started with them. Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, told a Jewish debater that “we who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons,” and then echoed Isaiah: “our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into implements of tillage.” You can read it in his Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 110.
The early church read Isaiah's plowshares as what Jesus was already doing in the people who followed Him.
When Jesus teaches on violence, He does not start with nations. He starts with the human heart, which is where every war begins.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Not people who avoid conflict, but people who go and mend it. More in blessed are the peacemakers.
“But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). He said it to people living under a foreign army. See love your enemies.
“If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest” (John 18:36). His Kingdom is real and present. It simply does not come by force.
“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”
Matthew 26:52Do not make Jesus say more than He said. He gave no policy for Rome's legions, and He praised a centurion's faith (Matthew 8:10) without a word about his job. What He refused, completely, was letting His Kingdom be defended or spread by the sword. The personal side is in turn the other cheek and what the Bible says about self defense.
In John 18:36, what reason does Jesus give Pilate for why His servants are not fighting?
Jesus says that if His kingdom were of this world, His servants would fight to prevent His arrest. His Kingdom is real, but it does not come from where Pilate's does, and it is not defended the way Pilate's is.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
The other side of the conversation quotes Paul, and it should.
“For the one in authority is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”
Romans 13:4Read it where it sits. A few verses earlier Paul writes, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends” (Romans 12:19), and tells the church to overcome evil with good. He takes vengeance out of the believer's hands, then says civil authority exists to restrain wrongdoing.
So the state's sword has a legitimate job: stopping wrongdoers and protecting people. Romans 13 does not say every sword a ruler draws is God's, and it does not turn any government into the Kingdom. The same apostles who honored rulers also said, “We must obey God rather than human beings!” (Acts 5:29).
What about soldiers? John the Baptist told them not to extort or accuse falsely, and to be content with their pay (Luke 3:14). Cornelius, a centurion, received the Spirit in Acts 10. Neither is told to leave the army. That is an argument from silence, and we will not stretch it into a blessing on war.
Romans 13 gives the state a sword to restrain evil. It never gives the church one to build the Kingdom.
Believers who love Jesus have answered this differently for centuries. Both answers deserve a fair hearing.
Many early Christian writers opposed believers shedding blood, and Justin read Isaiah's plowshares as fulfilled in the church. The historic peace churches, Mennonites, Quakers and the Brethren, still hold that a follower of Jesus does not kill, even for a nation.
Writing to a Roman officer named Boniface, he said, “Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity.” Read his Letter 189.
“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary”: the authority of the sovereign, a just cause and a rightful intention (Summa, II-II, Question 40). Later thinkers added last resort, proportion and a reasonable chance of success, as this encyclopedia entry on just war theory lays out.
Both reject hatred and revenge. Both treat war as a tragedy, never a glory. The just war tradition was built to restrain war, not to bless it.
At Sound of Heaven we read every war in Scripture through Jesus. No nation today is God's covenant people fighting His battles, and no war is holy. The Kingdom of God is here now, and it has never been advanced, defended or spread by the sword. That is our position.
We respect both traditions. The peace tradition is right about the heart of it: Jesus told Peter to put the sword away and then healed the man it cut. The just war tradition is right that love can require protecting people who cannot protect themselves. We honor believers who serve in uniform and believers who refuse to.
We refuse the errors on both sides. Dressing any war in holy war language is wrong, and it gets used to turn neighbors into targets. Treating a Christian veteran as less faithful for having served is also wrong. We do not take sides in the politics of any war.
Every time a conflict fills the news, someone reads Matthew 24 as a countdown. It is not one.
“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”
Matthew 24:6Jesus was answering a question His disciples asked about the temple in front of them (Matthew 24:1 to 3). The wars He warned about were theirs, and He set the time limit Himself: “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (24:34). The Jewish revolt broke out in AD 66, Rome tore through its own civil war in AD 69, and in AD 70 the temple fell. That was the end of the old covenant age. More in the Olivet Discourse.
Jesus told them not to be alarmed, so using this verse to make people afraid gets it backward. Wars today are tragedies to pray over and work against, not markers on a prophetic clock.
“Wars and rumors of wars” was a warning to one generation, fulfilled by AD 70, not a sign to watch the news for.
Some readers do not need a theory of war. They carried one home, and their families live with it too.
There is a name for one of those wounds. The VA's National Center for PTSD describes moral injury as “the distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to such events,” meaning things a person did, saw or could not prevent that went against their own deep sense of right. You can read their overview of moral injury.
Guilt, grief or anger from war is not proof that your faith is weak. David wrote a lament over fallen soldiers (2 Samuel 1), and Scripture never asked warriors to pretend they felt nothing.
No memory is too heavy to bring to Jesus. Grace meets you inside it.
If you are a veteran, service member or family member in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is there: dial 988 and then press 1, or text 838255. It serves families and friends too. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
You do not have to carry this alone. Our pastors will pray with you through our prayer page.
Wounds nobody can see are not a failure of faith. They are a reason to be carried.
The Bible tells humanity's violence with an honesty that still unsettles readers. And then God shows us who He is in a man who would not raise a sword to save His own life.
Paul says of Jesus, “he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14). That peace is not waiting for a future age. The Kingdom is here, and every believer is sent into it as a peacemaker, in a family, a workplace or a country at war.
The weapons of that Kingdom are truth, prayer and love, which is what Paul meant by the armor of God. The fight is against deception and hatred, never against a neighbor.
For related reading, see the Prince of Peace, the character of God, what the Kingdom of God is and what we believe. If you are on Long Island, come and visit us in Deer Park.
Israel's wars are told honestly, the prophets longed for plowshares, Jesus put the sword away and made peace by the cross, and His people carry that peace into every conflict without ever calling a war holy.
Whether you served, lost someone, or cannot stop thinking about the news, send us a prayer request and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you.
The Bible records many wars, including Israel's, and never treats war as good. The prophets looked toward the day when nations would beat their swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4). Jesus, the full revelation of God, blessed the peacemakers, told His followers to love their enemies, and told Peter to put his sword away. Romans 13 gives governments a role in restraining wrongdoing, but the Kingdom of God is never advanced by violence.
Ecclesiastes 3:8 says there is a time for war and a time for peace. The poem describes the seasons of life in a broken world, the same way it names a time to die and a time to mourn. It observes that these things happen. It is not a command to go to war or God's endorsement of any particular one. Jesus shows that God's purpose is peace.
Sincere Christians answer this differently. The New Testament never tells soldiers to leave the army. John the Baptist told them to be honest and content with their pay, and Cornelius the centurion received the Spirit in Acts 10. Many early Christians refused to shed blood, as the peace churches still do. At Sound of Heaven we honor believers who serve with a clear conscience and believers who conscientiously refuse. Neither is a second class Christian.
In Matthew 24:6 Jesus was answering His disciples' question about when the temple would be destroyed. He warned them of wars, told them not to be alarmed, and said all of it would happen within that generation (Matthew 24:34). It did. The Jewish revolt began in AD 66, Rome fought its own civil war in AD 69, and the temple fell in AD 70. The verse is not a sign to read into today's headlines.
Scripture treats killing in war differently from murder, and Romans 13 gives the state a sword to restrain evil. It also never calls war good. David was kept from building the temple because he had shed much blood (1 Chronicles 22:8), and James 4:1 traces fights and quarrels to the desires that battle within us. Christians disagree on whether a believer may fight, but none should celebrate war or call it holy.